IronyGasm

Demographers seem to have trouble deciding where GenX ends and the Millennials begin: I’ve seen dividing lines ranging from 1975 to 1982. One of the ways people try to track these things is by figuring out when the last children were born who remember some milestone moment—do you remember the Kennedy assassination, or the Challenger explosion? Well, as someone who feels in his bones that he belongs on the lower cusp of GenX, I think a pretty good “milestone” divider is: Do you remember watching Schoolhouse Rock! cartoons on TV as a kid? So you can only imagine the sort of generational epiphany I had upon discovering (just tonight) the 1996 album Schoolhouse Rock!, Rocks. Ignore the stick-in-the-mud Amazon review and thrill to Pavement’s cover of “No More Kings,” Ween doing “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” Folk Implosion on “I’m Just a Bill,” Moby’s rendition of “Verb: That’s What’s Happening,” and Man or Astro-Man’s take on “Interplanet Janet.” Mmmm… ironolicious. (Bonus: the tracks are actually good, without quotation marks.)